Messages abound in this space. Being heard or thought of as important comes with the price of crack observations from an elevated position or spam-like audacity. I have neither. My message is simple. As anyone does, I grapple with demons and the motives behind them. I look for the paths of change and wonder why it appears to be happening so fast without anything being accomplished. But not everything is an oxymoron or some tripped-up juxtaposition... The soft path is like that.
In North America Timothy Leary's advice to Turn ON, Tune IN, Drop OUT was followed around the same time as the Energy Crisis bred a new consciousness about what it cost to get around. People wanted to farm the wind and sail the sun. And then we had a few decades of silence. Perhaps green and gold stood in the way of happiness (or paved the road your car was driving on). Renewable energy was a thing of individual people not of the masses. The masses under the protectorate of "other" issues forgot the soft path in centralized energy at moderately affordable prices. Turkey dinners still warmed under the element as the work day lengthened. And we called it progress. Products that cost less in the short-term piled up. The volkswagon (wagon of the people) walked a person to work along a two-lane hiway. And the traffic never bothered anybody.
The Hydrogen Economy. Yep.
Panel Says Hydrogen Fueled Cars Won't Hit Hiway Soon
New Report Finds Fuel Cell Forecasts Cloudier Than Expected
No one wants to believe we aren't there yet. Do they? Is 25% of the world's vehicles (owned and operated by 13% of the world's population) powered by hydrogen in 25 years a positive message?
Some pundits argue that unless sales in hybrid gasoline/electric vehicles pick up the transition could take even longer.
In the next few years you are going to see distributed electricity production by stationary fuel cells powered by hydrogen or natural gas. Realistically this means The Hydrogen Economy is still 75 years off. Not in my lifetime.
This move to small scale local production satisfies the security and service conscious electrical power generating industry, alleviating fears over large-scale outages recently experienced in North America and Europe. Local production means that if part of a grid gets knocked out then you don't have to worry about your neighbourhood. But is the soft path served by this? Not likely.
Here's why. The soft path really means appropriate energy for the need derived from distributed sources. This doesn't mean the network infrastructure must be distributed. It means generation from alternatives such as solar, wind, wave, geothermal, microelectric, fuel cell, etc. What legislators fail to see is that even distributed energy production is served by the infrastructure we have already built. Perhaps the focus on preventing outages similar to those already in the public mind will blind the issue to even strident environmentalists. Time will tell. What does seem clear is that something must be done to ensure the soft path is not threatened.
In the US and elsewhere around the world it is the proponent of the centralized model of distribution who leads the future as in this address to the US-based National Academy of Engineering.
The Future of the U.S. Energy Industry as outlined by CEO of American Electric Power (AEP), a utility with 4.9 million customers in the US alone.
Two measures are immediately important:
Legislate large-scale producers to buy power from individuals.
Legislate in all building codes that new housing starts be fitted with power-sharing circuitry.
Such a change has far-reaching implications, especially as it relates to hydrogen-powered vehicles implementing Regenerative Fuel Cells (RFC). One of the pervading arguments against this closed system cell is that photovoltaic input hasn't been sufficiently developed and that to run these cells need to be 'charged'. This is where the electrical grid comes into play.
In a future scenario let's say your car is manufactured and 'charged' with hydrogen. Solar panels adorn the outside of your vehicle. In fact, all vehicles on the road use some sort of photovoltaic arrangement. Yet, the adverts on the side of the bus seem intact. You drive home on hydrogen and plug your vehicle in again when you get home to 'recharge' it by using electrical power to create hydrogen from the waste of its use as the 'fuel' of the 'battery' driving your car.
Different Types of Fuel Cells -- see the bottom for Regenerative Fuel Cells.
There is so much to say and there is so much to do.
Plans to use ethanol or diesel fuels as transitional combustibles which pass less particulate into the air don't seem to take into account that diesel is a cancer causing fuel. People who live within a block of a diesel engine run for just 10 hours a month are at 50% greater risk of contracting cancer than someone who does not live within the same radius (If someone has a link to this article please post it).
Eventually I wan't to break this blog down into useful bits where new information can be posted and properly sorted. I envision an RSS feed from this blog with multiple contributors in each of the sections. My hope is that some of the brainier hacktivists out there will be able to help with creating an OpenSource repository of fuel cell information for the purposes of hastening the pace of the world's transition to the Hyrdrogen Economy by the grassroots. After all, it would be nice to be able to afford some of this technology. A lot of it is absolutely ready to go.
So, I post this challenge.
Give Hydrogen to the world.
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